The Ant Farm Read online

  Copyright 2019 by Quincy Bragg

  All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, events, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living, dead, or yet to be born, to actual locales or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Published by

  Editorial de la Visitación

  Brisbane, Ca.

  [email protected]

  For copies of this book signed individually by the author, with a simple dedication if requested, contact the publisher at the address above.

  Cover design by Patrick Kang.

  Formatting by Polgarus Studio.

  ISBN 978-0-578-59750-8 (ebook)

  ISBN 978-0-578-59751-5 (paperback)

  To

  Rocket

  who will, no doubt, see something like this come to pass.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  O, Bison bison,

  silhouettes in prairie dusk,

  shoulders like mountains,

  your numbers eroded to dust

  now that we cover the land.

  Chapter 1

  “I’m from upstate, goddamnit,” Shel told herself through gritted teeth, “this is nothing!” She had a death grip on the steering wheel as her car slalomed ever so gracefully from side to side on the icy ranch road. “Turn into the slide,” she told herself, again out loud.

  Light snow was falling from a gray sky. The road had been flat and reasonably straight, but she was late for her first day at the ranch and going too fast when she hit a long patch of black ice. Just as she regained control the road curved to the right around a low rise. She was unprepared for the turn, and doubly so for the half dozen bison standing in the road beyond. She gave a yelp of panic and wrenched the wheel left. The car spun slowly halfway around, then off the road, down a couple of feet, and into a snowdrift.

  “Damn!” was all she could say when the car came to a firm stop. She pounded her hands on the steering wheel and said it again. Whose bright idea was it to quit a good job in Boston and come out here anyway? Oh yeah, mine, but mainly Colin’s, she thought. It was a Tuesday morning in early March of 2040 near Great Falls, Montana.

  She took a minute for stretching and flexing to determine she was unbroken and unbruised then opened the car door and stepped out into the snow, only a foot deep now the car had plowed it for her. A moment’s survey told her there was no way she would be able to get it out herself—she had driven into enough snow as a teenager to know stuck when she saw it.

  The bison, still standing on the road and chewing their cuds, looked down at her with what she imagined was interest. They are huge, she thought. Shel had never seen one in real life, but in the last six weeks she had studied up on them in preparation for her move. Cattle too—this was a beef and bison ranch after all—but the bison had been her main interest. From her level, a couple of feet below the road, they looked enormous: six foot to the shoulder, humps above with a dusting of snow, big heads, upward-curving horns, shaggy winter coats, and swirls of mist jetting from their nostrils with each breath. One shifted his weight and snorted into the silence as he pawed the asphalt. Shel stayed where she was, beside the car, knowing from her research of their reputation for aggressive bad tempers.

  Shel continued examining their every feature for a couple of minutes until the cold caught her attention. She was wearing a heavy coat, but she felt the ten degree air on her face and ears, so she bent and reached into the car to get her hat then stood back up and looked again at the bison as she pulled it over her head with the ear flaps down. Not antiquus, just bison, she thought. Antiquus horns are horizontal, not curved. Anyway, those are down at the farm.

  She closed the door and stood staring at the bison for another minute or two before her thoughts returned to her predicament. “Damn!” She knew the drill for winter car accidents: keep warm, keep the car warm, don’t waste fuel, call for help, stay safe. Is there com net out here, she wondered without much confidence as she reached into her coat pocket for her tab. Still watching the six tons of iconic American frontier symbolism, she said, “Don’t worry guys, I’m on your side.” To Shel’s relief her small tab screen showed there was signal, and to her surprise it gave her a map when she asked. Maybe a mile to the ranch headquarters. Not bad, I could walk that if I could get past the bison.

  So much for my smooth, professional arrival. What are they going to think? City girl can’t even drive to work in a little snow? Suck it up, Shel, you have an assignment. She looked at the screen again—not enough bandwidth for video. At least they won’t see me being an idiot in the snow. “Call the ranch office,” she told her device.

  The line rang twice before it was answered by a cheerful female voice, “Good morning. B.a. Ranch.”

  “Mrs. Jones? This is Michelle Perry.”

  “Well, good morning. We’re all looking forward to meeting you in person. How are you?”

  “Not so good. I’m in a snowdrift about a mile from the office with half a dozen bison staring at me. There’s no way I can get the car out myself.”

  “Oh dear! You’re not hurt, I hope.”

  “No, just embarrassed. Can you call a tow truck or something? I could walk the mile but the bison are watching me so I’m staying next to the car.”

  Mrs. Jones laughed. “Good idea. I’ll call a couple of the guys and have them out to you in a few minutes. If they can’t get the car out right away they’ll bring you here and pull it out later on. Stay in the car and keep warm. I’ll call back if I think it will be more than fifteen minutes. And I’ll start a new pot of coffee.”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Jones.”

  “See you soon. And please, just call me Bridget,” she finished on a friendly note.

  Shel remained standing by the car. The landscape was flat with rolling hills to the south that would become the Little Belt Mountains ten miles beyond. It wasn’t that cold, and she was transfixed by the bison. This is so strange, she thought. She had grown up in Cicero, a suburb of Syracuse, New York, and lived the previous eight years just outside Boston. The cold didn’t bother her, but the open, seemingly empty, landscape was something completely alien. On the drive across country in her trusty (now snowbound) sedan she had gone from urban to rural to areas of vast flatness, but there had been other cars on the highway, signs, stores, and motels at the exits. Even the long last day of her drive, from Gillette to Billings to Great Falls, had not prepared her for this morning.

  She had left her new apartment in the dull light of an overcast sunrise and was very quickly out of town into ranch country. She followed the map on her tab to the ranch boundary, where the road shrank to a skinny lane and a half, then put her device aside because she knew there was only one place the road went. The assistant ranch manager, Tom, had told her to take her time on the first day, to take the ranch road after sunup so she could get to know it, but even so she felt late.

  It had been hard to concentrate on the road not because there was so much to look at, but because there seemed to Shel so little. She was amazed by the emptiness. The cold, snow-white with occasional dirt brown patches, emptiness. Every two or three hundred yards a snow stake on the right, closer together at bends in the road. Never had she felt so remote. It occ
urred to her that the middle of the ocean must be like this: expansive, uninterrupted, and lonely.

  She knew nobody here. Sure, there had been video conferences as part of the hiring process but that was different from actually meeting people. She had some names of people connected to activist environmental groups around Great Falls but she hadn’t called any of them yet. Too soon. It continued to amaze her that she had gotten the job, or even been considered, what with her active membership in a group adamantly and aggressively opposed to all forms of genetic modification of plants and animals. Yet here she was at a center for breeding such animals. The ranch was owned by Jimmy Bell, CEO of AstroGene, the leading creator and purveyor of genetically modified livestock. On this ranch was a herd of Bison antiquus, predecessor of the modern plains bison, extinct since the ice age, ten thousand years. Breeding them from intact cells found in ancient frozen carcasses was the sort of flashy stunt that proved AstroGene’s people were nothing but showmen with no respect for the natural world.

  When Colin had told her that there was a new genetically modified livestock project coming to the ranch and that there was an opening for a bookkeeper, she told him she was all in. She would be undercover, reporting to Colin everything that happened at the ranch, finding out what the project was about so Colin and his people could stop it.

  Shel needed a change anyway. Since last fall, when she had discovered by chance that Rick, her long-time boyfriend, was a lying, cheating, slimeball, she had been depressed and aimless. Colin’s suggestion she go out west and bring the pirates of genetic science to heel had been perfect. She jumped at the chance.

  After two days of unpacking and settling into her new apartment (which Colin had arranged in advance) she messaged him to say she had arrived and to thank him for organizing the apartment rental and how nice it was. His only response had been a terse “Keep me posted.”

  She was nervous for her first day on the job, a job she had made a huge personal sacrifice for and commitment to. Now she was calmed down, back inside the car, waiting, and her mind focused on making a good start. Bookkeeping on a ranch—how hard can that be? She knew she was overqualified after rising to assistant manager of the accounting department in her previous job. The spying part is going to be hard. Will they see through me? Will I get fired, or sued or something? Colin said to give it a couple of weeks to just settle in, get the lay of the land, before I start snooping around.

  She looked out at the falling snow and the six bison in the gray light. It was like a motel room painting. What a cliché!

  A few minutes later there came the harsh noise of something with a defective muffler approaching, and Shel looked over her shoulder to see the bison amble away. A truck came into view. It was bigger than a large pickup, with no fenders and only a flatbed, a grille that looked like storm-drain grating, faded paint, and big knobby tires. Jeez, that thing must be fifty years old.

  The truck came to a stop and silence descended when the motor shut off. Two men got out of the truck. Shel’s pulse accelerated: she knew in that second she was a stranger in a strange land. They were thirty or fortyish and both wore rough jeans, dirty leather cowboy boots, denim jackets lined with sheep’s wool, and wide-brimmed cowboy hats. One was tall and slender, his face weathered. The other, a few inches shorter with a more solid build, looked not so much younger as smoother, less worn by the elements. Her immediate reaction was that he was handsome in an honest, open way.

  She took a deep breath, snapped on her best face, and stepped back out into the snow. She looked up at the two as she closed the car door. “Hi,” she said with a smile. “I’m Shel.”

  The taller of the two men replied in a slow, deep voice, “Mornin. I’m Ronnie, this’s Matt.” He gestured to the other man who smiled while both of them surveyed the car. He turned and looked back at the road before he spoke again. “We’ll drive you over t’ the office for now. Ice’ll be melted after lunch. We can pull your car back up then.” Matt nodded in agreement.

  Shel hesitated, the events and decisions that had brought her to this place flashing through her mind, then stepped forward into the present as Matt reached a hand out to help her up onto the road.

  Chapter 2

  What a great way to start a meeting, Matt thought as he signed his copy of the new nondisclosure agreement: telling us all to shut up. He gave the paper to Tom, who gave it a quick look before passing it on with the others to the new bookkeeper. He thought the whole exercise overblown. He’d been at the ranch for five years and couldn’t remember the last time he had signed a legal document on paper. But the guy from PAS said that security on the project needed to be tight so nothing would be put into electronic format if it wasn’t absolutely necessary.

  “As you may have heard,” Steve Wilson, the ranch manager, said to the others around the table in the small meeting room, “there will be some improvements and renovations at the Research Center during the spring and summer to prepare it for a new project.” He’s really putting it on for us, thought Matt with amusement, nobody calls it anything but the ant farm.

  “Daniel here is the project manager for Pleistocene Animal Sciences,” Steve continued, “and he’ll give us an outline of what to expect, but first we’ll go around and let each of you introduce yourselves. Daniel, you’ve already met with Matt. He’s in charge of construction and building maintenance on the ranch. So let’s start with Ray.”

  The machinery and equipment manager introduced himself and outlined his responsibilities: “Anything with wheels and/or a motor, I keep it running. My shop’s the last one on the right as you go south. Me and two guys.” Brief and to the point, thought Matt. Next was the farming manager, a corporate type brought in a year after Jimmy Bell bought the ranch; then Dave, the ranching manager, who had been here almost twenty years. He’d started as a ranch hand and worked his way up with a mix of competence and determination. If Tom ever left Dave would be assistant ranch manager in a heartbeat.

  Shel was last to introduce herself. She said she was brand new on the job but looked forward to helping Daniel out in any way she could. Matt liked her, even though she had only been there a couple of weeks. She was upbeat and friendly. She looked a few years younger than Matt—thirtyish, he figured—and she was slim, with shoulder-length straight blond hair and dark-blue eyes behind her thick-framed glasses. Why did she come all this way from back east? How long will she stick with it?

  Already she seemed to have a better grip on the accounting system than the previous bookkeeper had after three years, and the once or twice a week he came into the office, she was interested in hearing about his work and what was happening out on the ranch.

  “Thank you all,” said Daniel as he looked around the table. “I’m glad to meet you. This project will be very self-contained since the work is being done by contractors, so, with any luck, you’ll not be seeing much of me at all. Except for Matt.” He gave a thin smile. “He will be helping to coordinate some of the work outside the building.” Daniel spoke in a high, somewhat raspy voice that grated on Matt.

  The man was tall and fit, and he wore new-looking outdoor work clothes. When Matt had spent a day with Daniel the previous week reviewing the fencing plans and riding part of the proposed fence line, his impression had been of a recreational type, not someone who actually worked outside. Was that going to be a problem? Time would tell.

  Daniel started his presentation now by showing a map of the new fence project, five miles of twelve-foot high heavy-gauge chain link, then he went on to discuss the modifications of existing pens and the interior of the ant farm building. The last part was the shortest and amounted to “I’m not telling you what will happen in there” in a tone that clearly conveyed it was nobody’s business but his.

  Dave asked what type of animals the project was about. “I don’t know,” was Daniel’s reply. “I have plans and a schedule, that’s all. When there’s a question that relates to the research animals, I’ll call my boss and ask her. She’ll give me an
answer that does not include any information on them. This is a very competitive business, our research is extremely costly, and nobody gets information they don’t need to know. I’m here to do construction. Other people do animal science.”

  There were a few more questions but no informational answers and Daniel left a few minutes later the others went on with their monthly ranch management meeting.

  **

  Easter was on the first Sunday of April. The B.a. Ranch was holding a party for its employees as it had every year since anyone could remember, long before the current ownership under Jimmy Bell. It was a pleasant day for early April in Western Montana—highs in the upper fifties, light winds, partly cloudy, no rain. There were about fifty people gathered, mostly ranch employees and spouses but also a few friends and seven or eight young children. The eggs had been hunted, and the party was now spread out across the patio behind the ranch administration building. It was a large area with low stone walls, square concrete pavers, and a few trees set in large raised planters across the space. The trees were just budding, and green had barely begun to show in the planters along with the first daffodils of the year in the garden strip along the wall. Tables and chairs had been pulled from storage and set out, but their umbrellas were left furled so the partygoers could make the most of the partially sunny afternoon after the long winter.

  A ranch hand named Jake was in charge of the barbecue, a deep three-by-eight-foot steel box with a wood fire on the bottom and adjustable grating top. The grate held slabs of bison, which Jake would poke and prod every few minutes, eventually cutting off some slices to send to the serving line. The scent of the meat cooking and of the sauce Jake brushed on it every few minutes, was thick and smoky and subtly spicy—more an airborne taste than just a smell.